The only ethical and truly humane way to live is to adopt a vegan diet and
lifestyle; to see all animals as having intrinsic
value and to live your life in a way that reflects and supports that philosophy.

Fish feel pain, demonstrate thought processes, and
have a will to live; we must not dismiss their interests simply because we don’t
fully understand the intricacies of their lives.

Fish have the right to live free in their natural environment; they are not here
for us to harm, kill, or otherwise exploit.

Imagine you are having a picnic at a park with
your friends and family. You see food you like and take a bite. Suddenly you
feel a sharp pain in your mouth. Blood washes over your face as you struggle,
unsuccessfully, to get free. You are dragged away from your family and friends,
up into the sky and then outer space.

You flail and struggle to breathe but you can’t
get any oxygen. You feel your eyes bulge and your insides feel like they are
about to explode out of your mouth due to a rapid change in pressure.

Then you see large, alien creatures looking
down at you. Their hands grab your body and throw you onto the floor of their
ship. You gasp for air but you are not designed to breathe in this environment.
You feel the cold of crushed ice packed around your body. Bleeding and in pain,
you slowly suffocate to death.

For more than one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) fish who are killed every year
worldwide, this is very similar to what they experience in their last moments of
life. While the methods in which fish are caught and killed may vary, every
individual fish experiences fear and pain when dragged from their underwater
homes into a world that is alien to them.

Fish Feel Pain

Fish are not swimming vegetables; they are animals with developed nervous
systems and brains capable of processing pain and fear. While this is obvious to
many, some people still believe fish are incapable of feeling pain and fear, or
the loss of family and friends. Several recent studies and reports prove
otherwise.

One Blue Fin Tuna...one of millions slaughtered yearly.

Author of the 2010 book Do Fish Feel Pain? and Penn State professor Victoria
Braithwaite says, “We now know that fish actually are cognitively more competent
than we thought before—some species of fish have very sophisticated forms of
cognition…In our experiments we showed that if we hurt fish, they react, and
then if we give them pain relief, they change their behavior, strongly
indicating that they feel pain.”

This is the face of a fish...THIS is the face of an individual living being!

"There is a perception that fish have simple brains and are incapable of
feelings, and this has somehow made them different from birds and mammals when
it comes to our concerns for their welfare," she said. "But we now have strong
evidence that suggests fish are more intelligent than previously thought and
their behavior more complex."

In the journal Fish and Fisheries, biologists Calum Brown, Keven Laland, and
Jens Krause write, "Gone (or at least obsolete) is the image of fish as drudging
and dim-witted pea-brains, driven largely by 'instinct'…Although it may seem
extraordinary to those comfortably used to pre-judging animal intelligence on
the basis of brain volume, in some cognitive domains, fishes can even be
favorably compared to non-human primates."

In a cruel experiment, Joseph Garner, an assistant professor of animal sciences
at Purdue University, and Janicke Nordgreen, a doctoral student at Norwegian
School of Veterinary Science, injected half of a group of fish with morphine (a
pain reliever) and injected the other half with a saline solution (not a pain
reliever), then subjected both groups to burning sensations. Garner describes
what he observed: "The fish given the morphine acted like they always had:
swimming and being fish…The fish that had gotten saline…acted with defensive
behaviors, indicating wariness, or fear and anxiety."

Nordgreen explains the results: "The experiment shows that fish do not only
respond to painful stimuli with reflexes, but change their behavior also after
the event.” That is, in addition to feeling pain, fish learn from pain.

Wild-Caught Fish

Most non-farmed fish who are killed by humans are caught in nets in the open
ocean and are still alive when they are pulled from the water. These fish
usually die from slow suffocation. They are often crushed to death under the
weight of other fish when they are dumped onto the deck or into the hold of a
ship, and many fish are packed in ice while they are still alive.

Some fish also suffer from barotrauma due to the sudden change of pressure as
they are pulled up from deeper water. This can cause their eyes to pop out of
their heads and their swim bladders to burst or be pushed out through their
mouths.

Some fish caught in gill or drift nets, large curtain nets that hang in the
water, may suffocate underwater. The fish swim into the net which entangles them
by their gills. This constricts their gills, making it impossible for them to
breathe. Gill nets, like other types of nets, catch indiscriminately.

Bean and Demersal otter trawling is used to catch bottom fish and involves
dragging nets across the ocean floor. This disturbs the natural environment and
can destroy sensitive marine ecosystems. It also causes the fish to be dragged
and bumped along the bottom before being pulled in. Pelagic trawling involves
setting nets on schools of fish, usually in shoals. Animals feeding on the fish
are often caught and drown in the nets.

Nets catch indiscriminately; anything in the ocean that is entangled in a net
will get caught and usually perish. This “by-catch” is usually thrown overboard
and not counted in a ship’s quota. In addition to non-target species of fish,
by-catch can include dolphins, turtles, birds, rays, and sharks. Shrimp nets are
notorious for catching endangered sea turtles.

Another common way of catching wild fish is called long-lining. It involves
setting out a length of line, often 50 miles or longer, to which short lengths
of line, or snoods, carrying baited hooks are attached at intervals. Each of
these hooks is baited by impaling a smaller fish or squid. This method is used
for catching larger fish, such as tuna and swordfish. Fish caught by long-lining
or other hook and line methods often spend hours hooked through the face, head,
or with a hook in their stomach, before being pulled from the water. Some fish
are eaten alive by predators, some die from exhaustion or trauma, and others die
from suffocation. When they are finally pulled in they are impaled by a large
pole hook called a “gaff” and pulled aboard the boat, resulting in potentially
deadly wounds and trauma to their heads or bodies. Long-lining also poses a
great threat to seabirds. Species such as albatross, petrels, shearwaters, and
fulmars scavenge on baited hooks, get hooked, are dragged underwater and
drowned.

Fish who are not suffocated or beaten to death, or fish caught by ships that
also process them on board, will die from beheading or evisceration - often
being skinned and gutted while they are still alive and conscious.

If any of the things people do to fish were done to a dog or a cat it would
constitute felony animal cruelty,
yet over a trillion fish suffer and die every year in such cruel ways.

In the US, fish (like birds and rabbits) are not covered under the Humane
Slaughter Act. Even if they were, any “humane” slaughter laws would be nearly
impossible to follow given the vast numbers of animals killed, their small size,
and the fact they are not slaughtered in their natural underwater environment.
Enforcement would also be difficult given the above factors, and because many
fish are not caught in US waters. Of course, discussion of humane slaughter [of
any animal] is merely academic, as taking a sentient life for pleasure or profit
is never humane.

Fish Farms

Over 40 percent of fish now consumed are raised in either land-based tanks or
enclosed pens in the ocean. With fewer wild fish in the oceans more and more
fish will be raised this way. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture
Organization reports that fish farming is growing three times faster than
land-based animal agriculture.

Farmed fish are forced to spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy enclosures
where many suffer from parasitic infections, diseases, and debilitating
injuries. In the severely crowded pens and tanks small fish are bullied and
killed by larger fish, so fish are continually sorted and grouped by size, a
practice called “grading.” Fish are sorted through a large strainer; small fish
fall through while larger fish do not. Repeated sorting stresses and injures
fish, leaving the animals vulnerable to disease.

Because they are designed to navigate vast oceans, many fish go insane from the
cramped conditions and lack of space on fish farms. The tight enclosures inhibit
their ability to navigate properly, causing them to run into each other and the
sides of the enclosures, resulting in sores and damage to their fins.

To increase profits fish on farms are severely crowded. Salmon farms are so
crowded—with as many as 50,000 individuals in each enclosure—that a 2.5-foot
fish spends his or her entire life in a space the size of a bathtub. Trout farms
are even more crowded, with as many as 27 full-grown fish in a bathtub-sized
space. High concentrations of fish lead to disease, so fish farms lace feed with
antibiotics and chemicals.

As many as 40 percent of farmed fish die from disease, stress, or cannibalism.
Fish who survive are starved before they are sent to slaughter in order to
reduce waste contamination of the water during transport. Salmon, for example,
are starved for 10 days.
Many farmed fish are beheaded or disemboweled while fully conscious. Others are
pulled from the water and left to die from suffocation, or are packed in ice
while still alive, prolonging their suffering. Some larger fish are beaten to
death with a wooden bat called a "priest."

On top of the cruelty and obvious health and environmental risks of fish
farming, many farmed fish are fed pellets made from wild caught fish. It can
take up to five pounds of wild-caught fish to produce just one pound of farmed
fish. Even naturally vegetarian fish are being fed fish oil and fish meal on
fish farms. It's likely that these fish pellets are the cause of the higher PCB
and dioxin contamination levels found in farmed fish, which are seven times
higher than the already-dangerous levels found in their wild counterparts.

Fish farms take another toll on wild fish in the form of pollution. Excrement,
uneaten chemical-laden food, and parasites from ocean-based farms spread to the
surrounding ocean, and the rampant disease inside the cages is passed on to
ocean fish in the area, in some cases increasing the incidence of sea lice a
thousand fold. These parasites eat at the fish, causing their scales to fall off
and creating large sores. In severely crowded conditions, lice often eat down to
the bone on fish's faces. This is so common that fish farmers named it the
"death crown."

The only ethical and truly humane way to live is to adopt a vegan diet and
lifestyle; to see all animals as having intrinsic
value and to live your life in a way that reflects and supports that philosophy.
Fish feel pain, demonstrate thought processes, and
have a will to live; we must not dismiss their interests simply because we don’t
fully understand the intricacies of their lives.
Fish have the right to live free in their natural environment; they are not here
for us to harm, kill, or otherwise exploit.

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